Douglas awoke to the sound of pounding surf and sunlight upon his face. Cirrus clouds streaked the sky above an opaque curtain of the enormous canopy bed in which he lay. To either side, towering cliffs ranged a bay that opened to a Pacific glistening with the rays of the setting sun. Gulls swooped and rose on warm updrafts and called to one another as if to him. He rolled the fine edge of a linen sheet between his fingers and then parted the curtain, rose, and walked across a slate outcrop and onto the first step of an infinity pool.
“I need a drink,” he said, and a wooden patio table and matching chairs appeared. Beads of condensation adorned the neck of an open bottle of Juglar 1820 nestled in five inches of rock ice. “Remarkable,” he said, as he poured himself a flute, cheersed the setting sun, and sipped.
A violet hummingbird with an aquamarine belly zigzagged around the pool and then hovered over Doug’s drink. He offered it a sip from his glass and the hummingbird retreated an inch. It cocked its head and said with a woman’s voice, “I never drink and fly.”
“Hi Kalie,” Doug said. “How was your incarnation?”
“Lovely,” the hummingbird said. “Be there in a moment. I’m… experimenting.”
The hummingbird darted off and Doug splashed some water with his foot. Sunlight danced upon the ripples.
“Nice capris!” Kalie said from behind him, and he turned, and froze. “What do you think?”
Kalie’s runner’s body was now an hourglass. Impossibly small hands rested on hips below an impossibly narrow waist. Her face was unrecognizable but for the mischievous glint in her eyes.
“Oh, my God,” he said.
“Too big? My lips? Or my tits?”
“An hour. And you’re a Kardashian.”
“You can do it, too,” she said.
He took a sip and looked out across the bay where he spotted a solitary figure standing upon a cliff.
“Strange,” he said. “No one can enter my demesne without my consent.”
“What?”
“Over there. On the cliff.”
Kalie followed his gaze, but the figure disappeared.
“He looked a bit like Rama,” Doug said, and they watched the cliff in silent recollection of their experience a week before, when people had swarmed out of terminals and surrounded parked passenger airliners as Doug, Kalie, and Rama raced down the tarmac in a black SUV. The clouds reflected San Francisco on fire.
They’d screeched to a stop next to a Gulfstream jet and got out. Kalie opened the trunk and grimaced. Rama’s grey shirt was blackened by blood and he clutched his abdomen.
“Up you get,” she’d said, and reached for Rama’s free arm as a mob tore away from the swarm and ran towards them. The copilot beckoned from the airstair.
“No time!” Doug said.
Rama tried to rise but fell back into a pool of blood.
“We can’t leave him,” Kalie said.
“He won’t last the flight.”
A gunshot rang above the engine’s whine, and Doug dragged Kalie away from Rama and onto the jet.
They flew fourteen hours over the Pacific to Paradise, the secret refuge others had built but they had coded, where Archons – technocrats like themselves – could hide in eternal bliss while the world died. All they had to exchange for digital immortality was their lives.
Rama made Paradise possible: he had fused the languages of neuroscience and programming to enhance the Archons’ pleasurable emotions and diminish the negative ones, like guilt.
Kalie said, “Wanna fool around?”
Doug’s mind turned from Rama to Kalie, and said, “Not with a Kardashian.”
Kalie winked and reverted into the lanky woman he recognized. She wore a baby-blue monokini. She stepped closer, and said, “I hate my nose.”
“I love your nose,” Doug said. He brushed a stray lock away from her forehead and tucked it behind her ear. They kissed, and she still tasted like Kalie.
“We have infinity to toy with excess,” he said. “Let’s keep things normal for now?”
With a snap of her fingers Kalie’s replaced her bathing suit with a pinstriped blazer. “Conservative Kalie, at your service! You’ve made a lady of me!”
“Stop it.”
“My grandmother would be so proud,” she said.
“You’d better pray she’s not looking,” he said, and pointed down.
Her eyes bulged. “You call that ‘normal’?”
* * *
Doug and Kalie spent their first month snowboarding, whitewater rafting, and BASE jumping off the Niphates. They fucked Marilyn Monroe and Brad Pitt.
During the first year Doug jousted with Sir Lancelot, Kalie commanded the Enterprise, and they indulged in sexual predilections they’d never dared in the real world with cunningly devised characters derived from their own imaginations. They chased dragons without any downsides until they discovered they could please themselves better alone.
“You’re gonna miss me,” Doug said.
“Hardly,” Kalie said. “Rama coded so well no one misses anyone. Besides, no Archon’s fucked me harder than my own imagination.”
“Yup,” he said. “Well, you know where to find me.”
A decade later, Doug became an accomplished painter, learned Cree, Hebrew, and Spanish, and – his oats now sown to Solomonic numbers – he married Elaine, his high school crush. Doug then spent weeks perfecting her: “Age her by twelve years,” he told the computer, “And get rid of that mole! Never mind. Bring back the mole; now make it half the size. Good.”
Doug conjured up former acquaintances for the wedding but was unable to duplicate Rama. When Doug asked Paradise why, it said, “My root code disallows simulations of Rama Ambedkar beyond 2-D images.”
You coded yourself out? Doug thought.
But as Elaine, resplendent in a snowy silk dress embellished with South Sea pearls, walked down Santa Maria Maddalena’s aisle, an uninvited man, wearing a crimson kurta and a matching dohti billowing around his thighs, materialized by the entrance. He gazed a moment into the stoup and then turned his ashen face from the holy water to Doug.
“Rama!” Doug shouted, but his old friend disappeared. Kalie and the other Archons glanced about curiously, but his simulated guests wept as if no outburst had occurred.
Doug stared at the stoup. He wasn’t sad; he didn’t miss Rama; yet he wondered at his lack of feelings beyond surprise and curiosity. Shouldn’t something leaden sink within his chest? Shouldn’t he fall against a pillar and curl up in a ball as he had when his father died? But Paradise deadened his emotions even as he remembered them. Elaine’s eyes never left his as she advanced down the aisle.
After the wedding Doug demanded an explanation, and Paradise replied, “Dr. Ambedkar was not present, but I detect a discrepancy in your memory algorithm. Shall I delete it?”
“No,” Doug said.
A century later, Doug earned the equivalent of eight PhDs and asked God if he’d made a grave mistake in coming here. He deleted Elaine and the kids and retreated to a small hermitage on the slopes of Mount Hermon where he fasted from the deviancies he’d grown accustomed to, save one: his hunger for knowledge. And sometimes, as he walked barefoot through the desert with an open book in hand and a goatskin satchel of unread books slung across his shoulder, Rama walked beside him.
Ten millennia later, after Doug had accumulated all the knowledge sequestered to Paradise and was esteemed austere and wise, the Archons petitioned Kalie to ask Doug how they could die, for Paradise refused to delete them.
“I’m done masturbating,” she said. She motioned at Rama, who scrutinized a nearby cactus. “I see him everywhere. A virus?”
“I don’t think so,” Doug said. “I’ll get back to you in a thousand years.”
* * *
Doug summoned Kalie and the Archons to The Golden Gate Bridge. Rama stood behind Kalie and his eyes smouldered with rage. The Archons watched Kalie expectantly, Rama doubtfully, and Doug hopefully when he materialized in their midst wearing a sackcloth mantle.
A mist arose from the valley and slid over the bay. It brought the scents of Monterey pine and ocean brine to Doug’s nostrils and he sighed, for even after millennia of fasting he couldn’t abstain from breathing for more than a few minutes. The mist reminded him of morning jogs with Kalie and Rama along the Presidio-Golden Gate-Crissy loop before they headed downtown to code Paradise.
Doug cried, “We abandoned the world when they needed us most! We discarded our bodies like rotting meat and hid in a mountain as the world burned. For that, we receive the greater damnation. As the world burned, so shall we. We exchanged the transient pains of life for an everlasting pain that’s just now kindling within some of you. For me, time has fanned that kindling into a raging fire that shall never be quenched.”
The Archons stood dumbfounded, but Rama strained forward as if listening to a crescendo.
“‘How can we die?’ you ask. Alas, we are already dead! And nobody can die twice.”
Kalie took Doug’s hand and they walked to the railing and looked out across the bay. Several Archons followed until a small line of people stood along the bridge’s edge.
“This is pointless,” said one.
“You know it can’t happen,” said another.
But when the sun set they leapt en masse and Paradise, as the others had warned, ensured they awoke safely back in their beds. They called it The Desolation, and it became a centennial ritual.
A hundred-thousand years later, with nothing new to learn or do, Doug tried to scramble his mind: Perhaps madness will deliver me from evil, he thought. But Paradise dutifully saved him from dementia.
Two million years later the living descendants of Homo sapiens abandoned their tools and crawled back into the trees, which Doug had no way to know.
It would take another ten million years for New Zealand’s South Island, where Paradise’s data vault was hidden deep within a black mountain, to begin subducting under the Australian plate.
A hundred million years later, when the solar system had completed half its orbit around the Milky Way, the mountain slipped into the earth’s mantle where the pressure and heat crushed the computer as Doug and Kalie jumped off the bridge for the last time.
I wrote “Bridge of the Archons” for a creative writing seminar at MacEwan University in 2025 where it received Honourable Mention in the Gloria Sawai Creative Writing Award.
My inspiration was Douglas Rushkoff’s Guardian 2022 article “The Super-Rich ‘Preppers’ Planning to Save Themselves from the Apocalypse”. I received Dr. Rushkoff’s permission to name my protagonist Doug.
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